Posts Tagged ‘president’

More ugly news from BlackBerry. On Friday afternoon, the company announced plans to sack 4,500 employees, as part of a massive restructuring intended to reduce expenditures by 50 percent by 2015. The reason: A horrific expected shortfall in second-fiscal-quarter earnings. The foundering smartphone pioneer said on Friday that it expects to report revenue of about $1.6 billion for the quarter, far below the $3.04 billion for which Wall Street has been looking. It also warned of a GAAP net operating loss of between $950 million and $995 million for the quarter. That includes an inventory charge that could be as much as $960 million, and a restructuring charge of $72 million. Finally, the company said it shipped 3.7 million smartphones last quarter, down from the 6.8 million it shipped last quarter, which was itself a disappointing figure. Even worse, BlackBerry said most of those handsets don’t even run the new BlackBerry 10 operating system on which it had hoped to mount a comeback

“It is the gold standard in phones,” Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller said of the iPhone 5s when he unveiled it during a special event at the company’s headquarters last week. And the pundits seem to agree. The first reviews of the device and its “unapologetically plastic” sibling the iPhone 5c published Tuesday evening, and they’re largely glowing with a few minor quibbles. Below, excerpts from a few of them. iPhone 5s Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD, The Wall Street Journal : After a week of testing the iPhone 5s, I like it and can recommend it for anyone looking for a premium, advanced smartphone. If you are an iPhone fan with any model older than the iPhone 5, the new 5s will be a big step up. If you own an iPhone 5, there’s less of a case for upgrading, unless you want the fingerprint reader and improved camera. Ed Baig, USA Today : Taken in totality, the features new to the iPhone 5s make what I consider to be the best smartphone on the market even better, helped enormously by Apple owning the entire end-to-end experience. In my view, iOS is still simpler to use than Android, and made even simpler in iOS 7.

Feds, Cops and Fox Sleepy Hollow isn’t the only new broadcast series worthy of checking out this fall. Here, five more reasons to tune into the Big Four. (Note: Every show here could be canceled by Columbus Day.)

Fox is heading back to the dance floor with its veteran competition program, renewing “So You Think You Can Dance” for an eleventh season. Announcement arrived during tonight’s live finale of the show, which was also interrupted by President Obama’s live national address to the American public regarding the crisis in Syria. “So You Think... Read more

PayPal says it’s finally serious about addressing some of its biggest customer-service issues, which its president admits the eBay unit has at times “become known for.” But can a company that hasn’t been known to wow any of its customer groups — business owners, consumers and developers — now start excelling at servicing all three? “It’s hard, yes, it’s hard,” PayPal President David Marcus said in an interview on Tuesday. “You have to have a group solely focused on consumer problems, one focused on merchant problems, and one on developer problems. We have a healthy tension there because it’s a culture change for the company.” Since Marcus took the reins in March of last year, PayPal has made a list of the 30 top issues it needed to rectify. So far, 80 percent of those have been addressed, he said. The fixes are aimed at issues ranging from improving the password-recovery process to putting a system in place that is working hard not to penalize legitimate sellers in charge-back disputes with shady buyers. “We’ve tweaked our models to catch more bad guys and way fewer good guys,” Marcus wrote in a blog post published today. “Hundreds of thousands of customers who may have experienced holds last year based on our policies are no longer impacted.” The company said it has also started absorbing $2.5 million a year in losses related to disputes between buyers and sellers over claims of counterfeit, low-priced goods. In these instances, the company won’t pull money from a seller’s account — giving them “the benefit of doubt,” — but won’t penalize a buyer, either. The result? PayPal says it has experienced 40 million fewer customer issues this year compared to last. Sounds like a great start. But, as Marcus well knows, a tainted reputation is not cleansed overnight. Or even in a year.

Taiwanese personal computer maker Acer Inc. said it plans to offer fewer Microsoft Inc. products and more Chromebooks and Android-based mobile devices, after it posted a surprise second-quarter loss on lower sales and rising expenses. “We are trying to grow our non-Windows business as soon as possible,” President Jim Wang told investors in a conference call. “Android is very popular in smartphones and dominant in tablets. … I also see a new market there for Chromebooks.” Read the rest of this post on the original site »

David Levy, the long-serving supervisor of ad sales, affilate relations and sports programming at Time Warner’s Turner cable-network unit, is being upped to president in a move that brings an important player at the company closer into its fold during a time of transition. Levy adds oversight of the company’s domestic entertainment and animation &... Read more

A day before President Obama is set to deliver a jobs speech at its Chattanooga warehouse, Amazon today announced that it is adding 5,000 full-time jobs to its network of warehouses. The hiring will occur both at current and new fulfillment centers, as Amazon expands its AmazonFresh grocery delivery business and competes with eBay and others to bring same-day delivery to the masses. Amazon currently employs 20,000 full-time employees across its 40-plus U.S. warehouses.

Software giant Oracle named Adrian Jones to head its operations in Asia. The move was announced in an internal email from Oracle president Mark Hurd, obtained by AllThingsD . If the name sounds familiar, it may be because Jones (pictured) is a former Hewlett-Packard exec who was sued by that company in 2011 . HP had alleged that Jones stole trade secrets and shared them with Oracle. The suit dates back to one of the more rancorous periods in the relationship between those companies, and the aftermath of the days when Hurd, who was for five years the CEO of HP, joined Oracle following his surprise resignation in 2010. (That situation, you’ll recall, spurred its own legal merry-go-round .) In a lawsuit filed in the California Superior Court in Santa Clara County, HP had accused Jones of copying sensitive files concerning its strategic and financial plans, plus other information, to a USB drive, and not returning them when he resigned from the company. Among other things, lawyers for HP had sought to examine every electronic device Jones owned, including phones and iPads belonging to his girlfriend. It later turned out that the copying of the files in question didn’t take place at the time that HP originally said it did, but during a period when the computer Jones used was in the hands of HP’s corporate security office. Talk about awkward . Since then, the case has been forgotten. HP was eventually forced to withdraw the case against Jones entirely, according to people familiar with how it all turned out. Neither HP nor Oracle would confirm that, however. Entries in the case-record file on the court’s website make vague mentions of a dismissal that occurred on July 30, 2012 . The case against Jones was one of many HP filed during a period when Michael Holston was general counsel at HP. Remembered as a key aide to Hurd during the years he was running HP, Holston remained HP’s general counsel during the 11-month tenure of former CEO Léo Apotheker, but was among the first members of HP’s executive council to leave the company after Meg Whitman became CEO. Anyway, enough with the legal footnotes. Here’s the memo announcing Jones’ promotion: From: Mark Hurd Date: July 24, 2013, 2:00:02 AM PDT To: Oracle Asia Pacific Sales The business across Asia Pacific represents a significant opportunity for Oracle. We continue to invest in this region and it is poised for growth. I am pleased to announce Adrian Jones to the position of General Manager and Senior Vice President, Oracle Asia Pacific. Adrian will lead the region for hardware and software, and be responsible for accelerating market share, revenue, and margin growth

While it is not yet clear that the NSA spying revelations will lead to any substantive change in the United States, the growing scandal is poised to spark even stronger data protection laws in Europe. European Union Vice President and Commisioner Viviane Reding said on Monday that efforts to strengthen existing privacy laws have gotten a boost from attention to the PRISM and other NSA data gathering efforts. “It was a wake-up call, thanks to the Americans,” Reding said, speaking at the DLDwomen conference in Munich. We do not want the U.S. government to listen to every phone call we make and read every e-mail, Reding said. “Data protection in Europe is a fundamental right,” Reding said. “Strong rules allow trust and, in the Internet world, without trust you cannot go ahead.” Speaking at the conference, which bridges women’s and technology issues, Reding said it is women that have been at the forefront of promoting privacy–a key ingredient to freedom and democracy. “It is mainly women that have understood that importance,” Reding said. Europeans as a whole, Reding said, are also more keenly sensitive to privacy issues after painful lessons of what can happen to citizens when governments misuse information collected about their citizens.

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Talk NYC/WW is your daily download of the tech, marketing and advertising news you need to know. It’s smartly curated to keep you up to speed on the innovators and innovations that are shaking up the digital world today.